CNN’s Rick Kaplan resigns

TheAssociated Press

NEW YORK (AP) -- With ratings dwindling and competitors chipping away at its dominant news role, CNN announced a restructuring Wednesday that included the ouster of the head of its U.S. network, Rick Kaplan, after three years.

CNN said it plans to more aggressively integrate its television and Internet operations. Its parent company, Time Warner, is about to complete its merger with America Online.

It is not clear whether Kaplan's job, president of CNN/USA, will be filled. In the restructuring, his duties were dispersed among other executives.

Philip Kent, formerly president of Turner Broadcasting System International, was appointed president and chief operating officer of the CNN News Group. Eason Jordan, who has controlled CNN's international news operation, will become CNN's chief news executive.

Kaplan was offered other opportunities within Time Warner but chose not to take them, said Terence McGuirk, who oversees CNN for Time Warner (TWX).

“I believe it best that I now move on,” Kaplan said. In an interview, he expressed no bitterness but said he was disappointed he wouldn't be able to see the job through to the end of the presidential election.

“I think they were very pleased and proud with everything we did on the air,” he said. “I think we were all disappointed that the ratings have fallen.”

Kaplan, a colorful 34-time Emmy winner during his long career as producer for ABC News, joined CNN as president of its USA operations in August 1997. He was given the mission of boosting the network's viewership when it didn't have breaking news to depend upon.

Those efforts, particularly a nightly newsmagazine called “Newsstand,” largely failed. Fox News Channel and MSNBC siphoned off viewers and, during good economic times, so did the financial network CNBC.

CNN has also been hurt by a growing number of local 24-hour cable news networks and the reliance by more consumers on the Internet for news updates, said Tom Johnson, chairman of the CNN News Group.

CNN's average daily viewership sank from 463,000 people during the third quarter of 1997, when Kaplan started, to 288,000 during the second three months of this year, according to Nielsen Media Research. The prime-time dropoff was even steeper, at 47 percent.

The network's second-quarter ratings were the lowest since 1988.

“One of the things that CNN has suffered from is the lack of long-running breaking news stories,” said Tom Wolzien, a media analyst at Sanford C. Bernstein & Co. “We had a huge number of these stories in the early 1990s when they were growing.”

Kaplan said it was difficult to attract attention to CNN's programs without extensive advertising.

“We're not promoting when MSNBC and Fox are aggressively promoting,” he said. “I think that is especially harmful to CNN.”

McGuirk praised Kaplan in an internal memo for “making us smarter, faster and more committed than ever to producing the best news coverage in the world.”

“There's nothing here that's going on that has to do with ratings, really,” he said in an interview. “We have got a major merger with AOL coming up. We have a news business that is making the transition toward a digital future that is slightly different from its analog present.”

Kaplan, whose friendship with President Clinton made conservative activists suspicious, is a strong-willed personality who feuded with one of his best-known anchors, Lou Dobbs, before Dobbs left for an Internet venture.

Kaplan survived a major scandal less than a year into his tenure, when the network had to retract a story that claimed the U.S. military used nerve gas on defectors during the Vietnam War. Two producers were fired as a result of the May 1998 report, and correspondent Peter Arnett left CNN within a year.

Jim Walton, who has been president of the CNN/Sports Illustrated sports news network, will be responsible for CNN's domestic news networks and Web sites.

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